I am a human chameleon. Give me a group of people and I will soon be just like them. It’s all about the language, really. Words, but also body language. Appearance. The chameleons’ skin takes the colour of its background, it’s exactly the same. All about appearances.
For example, recently I have been into business, suits, hotel rooms, meetings. Release me in a middle of a group of them and I will come back with all the business cards. Businessmen speak a degraded English with various accents, I like that part. Talk with an Italian, it’s a charming melody. Germans are more difficult to talk to, it seems that they can see through my chameleon cover, and their tone is less friendly. Businessmen like to do coffee breaks, but there is no break. They keep on talking about their work, especially engineers. That’s because they are no chameleons. Me on the other hand I quickly feel like moving to a catering employee. Starting to put away the empty cups and talk shit with new mates. Say how dirty these bloody businessmen are.
That’s where my disease lies. I can’t stop changing. I have to try everything out, I have been a city guy, going out every night in the bars, I have been a farmer, shagging girls in the hay, I have done a lot of shop employee, restaurant jobs, I even was a bum for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t be anything. This is a surface thing. I can’t be the president of the USA, I can’t come up on stage, grab a guitar and make a concert. These require some skills and I mean self-standing skills. Some things are difficult, and literally, a chameleon cannot imitate a Caravage painting. On the other hand there are a lot of groups that are very easy to join, like ideologist: fascist, communist, ecologist, feminists, because they all want you to think like them. Just let them convince you, say the same and dress the same. The easiest group to integrate are hippies, you just have to dress like them. That’s maybe where anybody that doesn’t really know what to think ends up. But really, only appearance matters for ninety percent of things. For the rest, once you feel like them, you act like them.
Once I went to the Netherlands. Immediately I felt like being Dutch for a while. It started in the bus. I suddenly understood how Dutch people enjoy life their own way. There was an old lady riding an electrical chair on the bike track. She was happy, calm and collected on her electrical ride. Doing 15 km/h easily, no hesitation on the steering, she was even putting her flickering lights on when she was changing direction. She gets to go out, she gets some ass-kicking bumps on the road, she gets wind in her white hair. That’s how Dutch people live, they know how to enjoy simple things. So I tried it out, it was easy because they all speak English. I ended up riding a tall blonde girl on the back of my bike along the canals. We drank a lot of beers, changed pubs and bumped into everyone to make our way through the Dutch crowd. We would have had a raw haring on the market if had still been Dutch the morning after, but it was not like that. Just in time I guess, because raw harings are really disgusting.
That’s my way of life, I like it because it’s varied. But sometimes I fall in an intermediate state, a bit undefined, where I am probably just myself. That’s when I freak out, because you better be someone, or something, if you want to have friends and stories to tell. I really hate being myself, it’s boring, I’m like an empty cup. I much prefer to fit in a category.
Being a chameleon is all about mimicking your background. To speak a foreign language is just an advanced way of mimicking foreigners. As a chameleon I always start by learning the language.
Like Italian, I love it. I try to disappear regularly in a group of Romans, because it’s very funny. They cook good food, and they take it seriously. They drink wine, joke all the time and only talk about girls and football. “Donne e calcio". They speak Italian with that rough Roman accent, like gentlemen-cavemen. They are often polite but rough, it’s all about charisma and leadership. Once, we spent the night showing to each other our good looking girl friends on Facebook, saying “Check that one out, I met her at the bar, I was walking and she stopped me to speak to me. And here’s what she wrote me the other day.”
When it comes to football, I like it less. That’s why for example I rarely do the football fan. It happens sometimes, though, and I’m quite good at faking it. Watch the game, the guys passing on the ball and criticizing everything, shouting “ooh” when it’s the right time to shout “ooh”. I don’t know the players and their background though, because that requires some practising. Read the football papers, I don’t do that. I’ve met guys that know in which club each player has been in, and what that same team was doing fifteen years ago. You can get really busy with that, there is basically a football game every single fucking day.
That’s what happens when you try everything out, you get the experience of what you like and what you don’t like. Who can say he doesn’t like art if he did not try being an artist? I did photography, painting, sculpture, music. As long as you are trying, you are already doing it.
Maybe everybody is a chameleon, everybody tries a lot of different styles, interests, jobs and even country. I know that a lot of people just become American: French, Chinese, Indian… A lot of them go there for work and just end up embracing the American way of life, all the way until raising American kids. Kids are the best chameleons, because they are looking for their real personality, they get influenced a lot and end up trying a lot if things out.
Maybe I’m some sort of unfinished kid.
